


With a Little Help From My Friends

by justanothersong



Series: Marvelously Supernatural [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Supernatural, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Hunting, Implied Unrequited Reader/Dean Winchester, Rugaru
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 10:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7841551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Please,” you whispered softly. You hadn’t asked for help, not once since you’d left. You hadn’t called on them, had turned your thoughts away to avoid any inadvertent emotions drawing any attention. But this was different. This was Bucky.</p><p>“Please,” you said again, voice low and choked with tears. Bucky’s eyes were unfocused and he stared at you even as he bled out. “Please, Castiel."</p>
            </blockquote>





	With a Little Help From My Friends

You were wrong.

Your intel had been wrong. The coroner’s reports, the witness statements, the local history you had managed to dig up. It was all wrong, wrong, wrong.

You’d made your first mistake since joining the team, and it was a huge one. Look what it had gotten you. Look where you were.

Crouched on the forest floor beside the unconscious form of Bucky Barnes, his only good arm half-torn from his bloody and blood bubbling out of a claw wound to his chest that had gone straight through his tactical gear. He was breathing, but barely, a fine spray of blood on his lips and face that came out with each sucking breath.

 

Everything had pointed to a Black Dog. The local were convinced it was a stray dog or a lone wolf stalking the woods around the little Midwestern town; the coroner reports had indicated that hearts were intact in several of the victims and the forest ranger insisted it was only canine pawprints they had found. It was happening too frequently to be werewolves and wendigos wouldn’t leave so much of their victims behind.

No one had made any point of telling you that the first suspected victim, a local man known well in the town, had never been found. They all assumed him another victim to the pile, as many had gone after the creature and not returned, but you knew better now.

No one told you that the missing man had a wife in the early stages of pregnancy.

No one told you that she insisted she had seen him, creeping at her windows with his face gone grey and wormy, eyes black as night.

You’d had no idea you’d taken a Bucky into the woods to face a rugaru.

 

Two years ago, you had thought you put the Hunter’s life behind yourself. You couldn’t take it anymore, watching those you loved die and be reborn as creatures of pure evil. Watching the small family you had become a part of consistently tearing itself apart, over and over. You’d had to go; you left only a short note telling them you were sorry, but you needed a normal life.

You had to try.

Your travels had brought you to New York City, a place big enough that anyone could get lost among the teeming crowds and life became a boring little 9-to-5 existence. It was lonely but it was safe; you passed them on the street from time to time, a vampire or a shifter or even other hunters, but they seemed to let you pass without incident. You were alone but it was quiet, and you felt perhaps the solitude was your payment for safety.

It wasn’t as though the world stopped turning. There was still weirdness out there, but it wasn’t your problem anymore. New heroes had risen to combat threats that came both from inside and outside of humanity, and you were happy to leave them to it, knowing still that your boys would be doing the same, out there on the road where the quiet darkness lived.

Until the day you felt a chill pass through the overly warm kitchen of the little coffee shop where you worked, in the lobby of Stark Tower. It’s a peculiar cold, the kind that came along with an angry spirit, and this one was livid. That was the day you snuck home on your lunch break to bring in a long parcel in through the delivery door to hide in the stockroom: a shotgun loaded with enough rock salt to blast a vengeful ghost for everything it was worth and buy you some time to keep people safe.

Steve Rogers had smiled warmly that very next morning when you handed him his cup of plain black coffee, turning back to Tony Stark and his frothy latte and saying, “Now that you mention it, it did seem kind of cold last night. Buck was sayin’ he could swear there was ice on his shower door.”

You inwardly groaned and knew that your brief retirement would be over, at least for the night. You worked a double and stayed on for the closing shift, ostensibly for overtime but more to be left alone as the lobby locked up for the night. You’d made it to the last public floor on the building, a fitness center for the employees of Stark Industries, before you were spotted. 

Tony Stark himself had popped down himself, clearly following the descent of the spectral intruder, and had barked out an order for you to drop your gun once your presence was noted. You hadn’t a chance to respond; the clearly pissed-off spirit of a mangled-looking woman appeared beside him and threw Tony back through a plate glass door. The two rock salt rounds you pumped through her sent her on her way temporarily, but drew in three others on the Avengers team, all shouting for you to drop the weapon.

Tony talked them down, convinced them you weren’t targeting him, and turned to question you. Before he got a word out, you sighed heavily and said, “Okay, who is she and which one of you pissed her off?”

The ghost turned out to be aiming its spectral claws at Natasha, a casualty of her early days in the spy game whose family had sent the vengeful spirit attached to a flower arrangement delivered to the Tower some days before.

Natasha frowned. “I told you that vase was weird,” she berated Tony, who had teased her endlessly about the sudden gift and insisted on displaying it in their common lounge. Beneath the flower stems and water had been several pieces of the woman’s corpse saved by some morbid family member prior to cremation.

You explained to the team how and why to burn what was left, and they hovered behind you in a circle of salt on an upper balcony, an old charcoal grill front and center as you barbequed the rest of the Black Widow’s victim.

“You’ve seriously never come across a vengeful spirit before?” you asked her skeptically, and the Widow had shrugged.

“I never really hung onto to any mementos,” she replied. 

The others stared at you with wide, questioning eyes, and you realized they had a lot to learn.

 

You became their teacher; expounding on lore and cryptids, telling them how and when to kill what needed killing and how to save who needed saving. What to stay away from. When to ask for help. And when they thought they would train you to accompany them on small missions into the field where they might encounter some of the creatures you described, you surprised them all with how well you could spar.

You were no super-soldier and relied on no gadgetry, and you surely lacked the elegance or expertise that the others had in their fighting, but you were tough, and scrappy. You knew what it was like to fight for your life, when the outcome of sparring would result in whether or not someone could live or die. 

You knew how to fight to keep the people you loved safe.

And just like that, you were on the team. Your coffee-slinging days were over. It was a lot cleaner and more technical than it had been before, but you were a Hunter again, and you were teaching the earth’s mightiest heroes how to be on guard for all possibilities.

You started researching, watching small town papers and odd news headlines. You took them out on small hunts to give them a taste of it, to get some experience beneath their belts. Hawkeye could put an arrow tainted with dead man’s blood through the chest of a vampire from a mile off, and the words of the Latin exorcism sounded strangely beautiful passing through Natasha’s lips. Steve proved strongly resistant to a Siren’s call (though it became clear that Tony should stay off that particular creature’s trail for good), and Bucky was best at retrieving cursed objects, as the new Vibranium arm created for him in Wakanda was resistant to anything their touch might do before he placed them in a runed box for safekeeping.

Bucky seemed to enjoy the hunt more than the others; you suspected that the act of putting down a monster that had once been human was cathartic for him, owing to his own past. He became the most learned among the team, and when you came across something new or unusual in your searching, he was always first to volunteer to accompany you. Steve seemed glad of it, seeing more and more of the Bucky he once knew emerging as the former Winter Soldier drifted further away, fueled by some sense of righting his own wrongs when stopping others from following his former fate. 

You started sleeping with him about seven months after the team had taken you on. He wasn’t necessarily your type -- you’d always had a fondness for green eyes, not blue -- but there was something about him that you liked, even grew to love. The physical attraction wasn’t even a question, and combined with the feelings blooming in your chest, you couldn’t stop yourself from kissing him one night after successfully freeing a town from a cursed coin that had kept passing hand to hand and wreaking havoc in its wake.

He had kissed you back with enthusiasm, and two weeks later when you pulled him along on a research missing to a small occult library a ways outside of Boston, you hadn’t been able to resist the way he nipped along your collarbone and whispered how badly he wanted you against the shell of your ear.

 

More than a year had passed since then and he was yours as much as you were his. You had even been excited to take him on this trip; Black Dogs had become increasingly rare and you knew Bucky would be fascinated with the hunt.

But you had fucked it all up.

And here you were, watching him, slowly dying as he rested against a tree trunk, the noises of the creature still stalking around you in the underbrush echoing beneath the low gurgle of blood and air escaping his chest.

“Please,” you whispered softly.

You hadn’t asked for help, not once since you’d left. You hadn’t called on them, had turned your thoughts away to avoid any inadvertent emotions drawing any attention.

But this was different. This was Bucky.

“Please,” you said again, voice low and choked with tears. Bucky’s eyes were unfocused and he stared at you even as he bled out. “Please, Castiel. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. I know I don’t deserve your help. I don’t even know if you can hear me anymore.

“But please, Cas. I can’t lose him. I can’t lose him the way I always lost everyone else, I can’t. If you can hear me, I’m begging you. Help me. Help him.”

“You don’t have to beg,” a low voice responded beside you, and you let out a breath in a mad rush of tears and laughter.

The angel looked the same, not that you expected otherwise. Same old trench coat. Same blue tie sitting askew against his chest. Perhaps there was something different in his eyes, something like resignation. He still gave you a small smile, and turned his gaze to Bucky.

“He doesn’t belong here,” he mused quietly, crouching there beside you. “This isn’t his time.”

“It isn’t his fault,” you told him quickly, afraid for one wild second that Castiel would refuse to help. “It was done to him. None of it is his fault.”

Castiel nodded, and reached out two fingers. Bucky’s eyes tracked them, his breathing still shallow but quickening as the foreign hand approached. When the angel touched his forehead, you’d had to shield your eyes, a bright light blooming from Bucky’s battered flesh arm.

And then it was over, Bucky sitting straight up with a gasp, whole again, the blood still staining his gear but the wounds gone.

“What in the hell…?” he started, and the angel quirked a small smile.

“Not quite,” Castiel responded, and you felt a brilliant warmth wash over you as he touched your shoulder, all the little aches and pains you had been suffering, as well as the gash to your thigh that you had ignored in the fray, suddenly gone.

You closed your eyes and let your hand settle over Castiel’s, even as Bucky glanced between the two of you, still uncertain.

“I can never thank you enough for this,” you said quietly.

“You don’t have to,” Castiel told you. “I understand why you left. We all do.”

You looked up at him with grateful eyes. “Do they hate me?” you asked.

Another small quirk of a smile. “Not anymore,” he told you. “They are happy you are safe. But I should be going. Dean will wonder where I’ve been.”

You smiled at his words. “What will you tell him?” you asked.

“The truth,” the angel replied.

“Always the best plan,” you agreed, and with a quick nod to Bucky, the angel blinked out of thin air, leaving nothing but empty space beside you.  
Bucky stared. “Do I want to ask?” he said.

You heard a sudden animalistic cry out into the forest and though the flash of light was far away, you still shielded your and Bucky’s eyes as a matter of course. Knowing the rugaru was no more, you stood and brushed the dirt and detritus of the forest floor off your jeans, watching Bucky do the same.

“Let’s get back to the car,” you told him quietly. “And I’ll tell you all about angels.”


End file.
